brian dichiara

Longest Spades Game Ever!

December 3rd, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Bin

The past few months or so, I’ve been playing Spades online at MSN Games Zone. I like it SO much better than Yahoo. Well, they’ve got this version called Whiz. Basically the rules are same as normal Spades, however when you bid, you must bid either the number of Spades in your hand or Nil. I really enjoy this game, almost a little too much. So tonight I got in a room with 3 others and little did we know what was sort of game we had gotten ourselves into. I can’t remember the stats exactly, but it was a 2050 rated player paired with a 1600 rated player, vs. 2200 and 1480. This game went 50 rounds of rediculous back and forth setting and missed nils. It took so long the other 3 players dropped out before it ended. I pasted the scores here.
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Nested Sub-folder Controllers in CodeIgniter

November 1st, 2009 | 1 Comment | Posted in Bin

If you have gotten to the point where one sub-folder for your controllers just isn’t enough, you probably found a frustrating problem in CodeIgniter. Whether or not MVC Frameworks are supposed to allow nested sub-folders is debatable, however I like the organization. This post solved my problem (very simply) and I got right back to developing:

Multi Level Subfolder Controller in CodeIgniter
http://glennpratama.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/multi-level-subfolder-for-controller-in-codeigniter/

Thanks Glenn!

Our First Big Fight

August 26th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Bin

I’ve been using CodeIgniter for the past 6 months or so and while we’ve had our minor indifferences, I’ve thought of CodeIgniter to be a pretty decent PHP MVC. There was very little learning curve for me and we hit off quite easily. We were like peas and carrots. Unfortunately, as go most relationships, I knew this “new love” wouldn’t last forever.
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Remap function for CodeIgniter

July 26th, 2009 | 2 Comments | Posted in Bin

I got tired of looking for this code in other projects so I wanted a handy place to keep it.

PLAIN TEXT

PHP:

<?php
function _remap($method)
{
if (method_exists($this, $method)){
$this->$method($this->uri->segment(3));
} else {
$this->index($method);
}
}
?>

In case you're wondering, this function is a reserved method in CodeIgniter controllers that will allow for a dynamic method name to be passed into the URL. Docs on it are here: codeigniter.com/user_guide/general/controllers.html#remapping.

Backwards Text in Gmail App

July 20th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Bin

I'm not sure exactly what happened here, but this is what I saw when I re-opened Chrome and my Gmail Tab that was left open got restored. Any ideas?

Why “hiding” source code is bad.

July 8th, 2009 | 2 Comments | Posted in Bin

I've been working at my current employer for about 5 months now and since I started, I have been involved in or heard this conversation more than 10 times, which is 10 times more than I've heard within the past 7 years I've been doing web development. The client wants their source code hidden from public view.

Let me first explain where I feel the communication has failed. The client says "Source code", however they may mean "Application code". To the client, when they "View Source", they may not know exactly what they are looking at, all they see is code. If they don't understand the difference between HTML code and Server side code (PHP/.NET/JSP), they feel like the code that makes their site work could be compromised. It is imperative that the client understand the difference between these 2 types of code and that their server side source code is safe.

Review of LG enV3 (VX9200)

June 14th, 2009 | 8 Comments | Posted in Bin

I upgraded my mobile device yesterday (relative to when I started this post on June 10th) from the LG VX8600 (Chocolate2 Flip) to the brand new enV3 (VX9200). I've already seen a few reviews out there, however it seems most, if not all have reviewed the slate blue, and not the maroon (red). I actually got the maroon version by mistake, however I actually like it, probably more than I would've the blue version. Let me tell you this is a great mobile device! I say mobile device because phone just doesn't cut it. It is packed with features, yet isn't so complicated to make usage difficult. Video below, or you can read the text version after the jump.

[video review ~~to be posted shortly~~ not coming ]

jQuery + JSON + AJAX = My own custom solution.

June 4th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Bin

So. In an effort to come up with a solution to a very common AJAX problem (at least for me), I have put together a little tutorial for handling AJAX responses in a simple, yet effective manner. Here's the problem:

AJAX is used sometimes for validation, sometimes for quick little updates to the database, and other times for the same old add/edit/delete functions. There's an infinite ways AJAX can be used in your web application, so I'm pretty sure my solution will not work 100% of the time, but it may make things a little bit easier to handle 90% of the time.